RAF targeting was so inaccurate, however, that by July farmhouses and villages were being hit. Both the regularity and the aimlessness of the bombing forced German civil defence volunteers to tighten air raid precautions across the towns and cities of north-western Germany. In Hamburg, the ‘chief complaint’, Shirer found, ‘was not the damage caused but the fact that the British raids robbed them of their sleep’, as every false alarm drove the city’s entire population from their beds. The clamour for retaliation grew.40
